


Strange Vibrations

by Mums_the_Word



Category: White Collar
Genre: Gen, Kidnapping, humor/crack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-27
Updated: 2015-07-27
Packaged: 2018-04-11 13:25:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4437095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mums_the_Word/pseuds/Mums_the_Word
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Neal is kidnapped by some strange characters during an FBI op. Ultimately, he must rely on his wits in order to save himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strange Vibrations

     Neal was off anklet once again. He was supposed to keep an appointment with a well-connected politician suspected of corruption, and a bulky lump under the cuff of his trousers would certainly ruin the lines of his meticulously tailored three-piece suit. The face-to-face was to take place in the guy’s penthouse apartment on 5th Avenue, and parking the dilapidated utility van on that prestigious street just wouldn’t cut it. Therefore, Peter and company parked one block south to let Neal out. The meeting was all preliminary fact-finding at this juncture, so a wire wasn’t thought to be necessary just yet. That would be a toy for another day when they had enough evidence for a warrant.

     Neal exited the claustrophobic box truck, shot his cuffs, and straightened his tie. He would cut down an alley on his approach to 5th Avenue, giving the impression that a taxi had just deposited him down the block. He hadn’t even made it halfway through the dim shortcut when someone stepped out of a doorway and grabbed him from behind. A pillowcase was jerked over his head, and the next thing that he knew, he was jostled into the trunk of a car that roared to life.

     The ride was less than comfortable, and he lost track of the twists and turns as he was jostled from side to side. For a while, the vehicle seemed to be humming along on an open highway. After some hours had passed, the car finally stopped, and thankfully, the trunk was sprung letting in blessed fresh air. The setting sun temporarily blinded the con man, but when he squinted, it seemed as if his captors, all two of them, were pretty impressive—at least in bulk, if not in height. To add icing on the cake, one of the bozos was holding a gun on him.

     “Out, Mr. FBI man,” the fatter of the two commanded.

     Neal complied and surveyed his surroundings. A run-down log cabin encircled by tall trees and nothing else loomed in front of him. He and his escorts seemed to be in the midst of the forest primeval, devoid of any other human inhabitation. “Chubby” and “Tubby” prodded him towards the small porch and front door where they fiddled for a while disengaging three key locks. Without ceremony, he was then roughly pushed inside.

     The cabin consisted of a large main room that had a fireplace, two sagging, moth-eaten sofas, and a few wooden chairs. An antiquated kitchen was off to one side. The Formica countertops were quite eye-catching. A decorator with an appreciation of style had made sure that the “Harvest Gold” shade matched the appliances. Neal suspected that the small alcove towards the rear of the dwelling housed sleeping quarters and a bathroom. Neal found himself postulating that, most likely, a cast-iron claw foot bathtub might be lurking somewhere back there.

     Apparently, this was not a spontaneous abduction just for kicks because Neal noted that the two kidnappers had made preparations in anticipation of his arrival. After emptying his pockets, they pushed him down to the floor next to the wall. A sturdy length of chain had been looped around a thick vertical pipe that disappeared somewhere into the ceiling above. The open end of the chain had been welded to a type of manacle wide enough to wrap around Neal’s ankle. What was it with everybody’s kinky obsession with his ankle, Neal wondered inanely? Then he noted that a Yale lock was supposed to secure the whole shebang together. Neal couldn’t believe his eyes. This was way beyond ludicrous, not to mention insulting! Did these two really expected to restrain him with the aid of a small piddly lock that every high-school jock used in gym class to secure their belongings temporarily while they shot hoops? Something was wrong with this picture!

     “So, what’s the deal, guys?” he finally asked with a smile and raised eyebrows as he played along.

     “We know you’re a G-Man,” Tubby explained, “ ‘cause we seen you with that other fellow awhile back when he came into the bodega on Seventh Avenue where I work to ask questions about the lottery machine. Since then, Benny and me have been taking turns following you two when we could. Today we both had off from work, so it was the perfect opportunity. We decided to take you ‘cause you don’t carry a gun. You’ve been kidnapped, Pal, and we’re holding you for ransom.”

     Neal opened his mouth, and then abruptly closed it. It was hard to wrap his head around this. He felt surreal, like he was in a movie with Dumb and Dumber. Not only had these morons let him see their faces, now they were providing names and places of employment as well!

     His kidnapper appeared to take Neal’s lack of response as confusion, and declared snidely, “If we have to tell you everything, then you ain’t too smart for an FBI agent, now are you!”

     Neal gave a mental snort. These two clowns should not be casting aspersions on anyone’s mental acuity since they certainly didn’t appear to be Mensa material themselves. If this wasn’t somebody’s idea of a practical joke, then it just could turn into a nightmare. Idiots were wildcards in the grand scheme of things. He would have to stay cool and see how it all played out.

     Neal appeared thoughtful for a few minutes before he spoke again, “Kidnapped, huh? Just out of curiosity, how much are you asking for me?”

     “Your Fed buddies are going to have to cough up $500,000 or else we start sending them parts of you, piece by little piece.” Tubby tried to look mean and menacing as he flaunted the gun.

     “Really, just $500,000? I don’t want to tell you how to do your thing, but I actually think that you have set the bar too low.”

     Chubby, his partner, was now confused. “What do you mean?”

     Neal could pull off disdainfully arrogant with a flourish. “Well, if you’ll look at the credentials that you have removed from my pocket, you’ll see that I’m not an FBI agent; I’m an FBI _Consultant_.”

     “So?” Chubby challenged.

     Neal just looked down his nose at the man, then closed his eyes briefly as if willing strength from a higher power. Neal thanked that deity when a lightbulb finally seemed to blink on in the second abductor’s brain. Suddenly, he became an authority who was only too happy to enlighten his partner.

     “Cecil, don’t you get it? He’s a ‘ _Consultant_.’ That’s like way more than an agent; that’s special. He’s the guy that the regular agents go to for help when they need advice. He’s the top dog, like an authority on crime. Of course, he’s more valuable!”

     Neal felt slightly mollified by his elevation in status. Of course he was an authority on crime! Nice of them to appreciate that. He could almost hear the wheels grinding laboriously as the two geniuses took time to think this over.

     “Maybe we’ll ask for $600,000 **,”** Cecil finally decided. Neal did a mental eye roll. Yeah, this one was a real Donald Trump with visions of grandeur! Neal also knew that the FBI did not negotiate with kidnappers nor pay ransoms. No siree bob—not one penny. However, he did not think that it was a good time to share that little tidbit of information. He would have to outsmart these paragons of brilliance, and that didn’t seem like too monumental of a task.

     Suddenly Cecil, or was it Benny, thought to ask a question. “How do you get to be a Consultant exactly? Do you have to take a test or something?”

     Neal gave him a sly look and said, “No test, but you have to have certain talents that the average person doesn’t possess.”

     “Like what?” Neal did a mental handspring because he knew the bait had been taken. Now it was time to slowly reel it in so that the fish never knew he was being played. This was almost too easy.

     “Well, I’m sure you’ve heard about all the experiments that the government has been conducting with the paranormal sciences. They get enormous grants to fund their research and seek out gifted people. It’s been leaked to the newspapers from time to time, even though the ‘ _Agency_ ’ likes to keep a low profile.” Neal had lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper and the two captors were leaning in to hear every word.

     “Sure, sure, I saw that in the newspaper,” one of them claimed, shaking his head adamantly to cover his confusion.

     “So, exactly what kind of special things can you do?” his partner inquired.

     “Oh, the usual bizarre stuff,” Neal said benignly. “You know, like clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, psychometrics, and of course, reading energy fields,” he concluded as an afterthought.

     The comically confused duo just looked at him blankly. They didn’t seem to know whether to be impressed or scared. Finally, Cecil seemed to awaken from his contemplative stupor.

     “Well, tomorrow morning the FBI is going to get an early wake-up call in their energy field. If they want their miracle asset back, they better do as they are told!”

     Neal then chimed in helpfully, “Maybe you should contact my partner directly. If you call the main switchboard, you may get lost in the shuffle because that automated menu is a bitch just trying to get through all the prompts. Hey, maybe you should just email him. His email address is dhaversham@area51 dot org. Maybe you better write that down so you won’t forget.”

     Cecil looked at Neal suspiciously, then finally admitted that he didn’t have a computer, so, ergo no email account. Neal sighed inwardly. Maybe this was going to be much harder than he initially thought. Nonetheless, he soldiered on.

     “Well, no worries, my fearsome captor. Just go to the public library. They have computer terminals for patrons to use. I assume that you have a library card. No? That’s okay—it’s all good, and we can work that out. You just have to give some information to get one immediately. Since nobody can trace you to a public computer, you will remain anonymous. Just ask a nice librarian to walk you through setting up a free email account via Gmail or Yahoo. Then you can log on and send your message to the address that I gave you. Usually, the session time limit is forty-five minutes on a library computer, so just sit tight and chill while you wait for a response.”

     Cecil scanned the address that he had written down. “Shouldn’t this like say ‘FBI’ somewhere?”

     Neal’s voice dropped an octave. “Area 51, Dude. It doesn’t get any deeper or more clandestine than that in the government.”

     Cecil and Benny did some whispered conferring, and Neal was hopeful. The next morning, it was Cecil who finally swaggered out the door with a last menacing look thrown in Neal’s direction. He had left the only weapon that they possessed with Benny.

     “Just keep an eye on him and shoot him if he tries anything weird.”

     The rotund man was gone for hours, and the day lingered on. The little less plump Benny kept the gun by his side and amused himself by reading DC Comics and some girlie magazines. By late afternoon, he had fallen asleep on the couch.

     Neal then cautiously extracted a thin piece of metal from his coat sleeve and, within seconds, had picked the useless little lock on his manacle. Benny’s snoring continued. The escape artist rifled through the contents of his captor’s wallet. Benny’s last name was Wisnewsky, as per his driver’s license, and he was twenty-eight years old, born on April 2, 1987. God help us, the man was even an organ donor! It was a good thing that brain transplants hadn’t been perfected yet. He had a membership card for Weight Watchers as well as a bevy of coupons for Pizza Hut, and several 50 cents-off coupons for Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream. There was $27 dollars in the billfold section as well as a very flat and desiccated four-leaf clover. This was a veritable goldmine of information that might prove to be invaluable down the road.

     Neal proceeded to appropriate a few things and make certain adjustments in the room. Then the would-be escapee sought the bathroom, climbed atop the rim of the anticipated old-fashioned tub with the prerequisite rust stains, and slipped through the window. He walked for at least thirty minutes without seeing anything more interesting than a groundhog who glared at him before retreating haughtily into the dense overgrowth. He felt like he was in the middle of the friggin’ Australian Outback! Okay—so this was going to be a little more intricate and time-consuming than he initially thought. Gamely, he returned to the cabin and let himself back in. He was re-manacled before he was missed, hoping that Mozzie would come through in a timely fashion.

     The clank of the old car that definitely needed a new muffler split the quiet bucolic solitude late in the day. Cecil came through the door with a look of triumph. Apparently, his mission had been accomplished.

     “It’s all set up! I sent the message, and after like forever, I finally got an answer. The FBI is going to try to get the money together. Now we just have to figure out our exchange strategy.” Cecil was annoyingly smug and full of self-confidence.

     “So,” he challenged his buddy sarcastically, “did he do anything ‘ _woo, woo’_ scary while I was gone? Did he levitate, or did his head swivel around like that girl in 'The Exorcist'?”

   Benny looked sheepish and didn’t answer.

     “You really shouldn’t mock,” Neal warned eerily, as his eyes narrowed and zeroed in on Cecil.

     “Oh, like you can do something about it,” Cecil taunted as he dragged a wooden chair forward so that he could get into Neal’s personal space and confront him. When the con man had been going about his chores earlier, he had the foresight to weaken the legs of that particular chair. As Cecil plopped down, it gave way with a pretty impressive crash and his ample girth landed hard on the floor at Neal’s feet. A self-satisfied little smirk now graced Neal’s lips, as the awkwardly scrambling behemoth clamored to his feet. His co-conspirator stood in frozen terror behind him.

     “He did that! He did that!” Benny chanted. “You pissed him off and now he’s going to get even! Jesus Christ, what have we done?”

     “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar, Bro,” Cecil tried to retain some degree of swagger. “That chair is old and probably just couldn’t hold my weight anymore.”

     “Exactly,” Neal agreed breezily. “You really should get more proactive about controlling your obesity. At least Benny has been trying to do something about his problem. He is going the Weight Watchers route, and I say good for him. Little lapses can be expected, of course, ‘cause we’re not all perfect. Pizza Hut does make excellent pies, and you can’t beat a bit of Ben & Jerry’s for dessert. I feel ya, man. My favorite is ‘Coffee, Coffee, Buzz, Buzz.’ How about you?”

     “Chunky Monkey,” Benny whispered, as if in a trance.

     Cecil was not going to show fear, at least not in front of his cohort. “He’s just making some wild guesses. Don’t let him freak you out. He doesn’t know as much as you think he knows.”

     Neal just lifted a condescending eyebrow and shook his head. “I’m detecting a very dark aura surrounding you, my friend. If you are hell-bent on self-destruction, so be it, but don’t drag this poor misguided guy along with you. Benny’s just twenty-eight years old with a lot of years ahead—if he gets to live them, that is.”  

     Benny was now white as a sheet, and Cecil looked sucker-punched. “How do you know my age?” the ice cream lover asked fearfully.

     “Well, it comes to me in fits and spurts, you see,” Neal admitted. “I kept seeing a four and a two, and later, a nineteen and then an eighty-seven. Those numbers just would not let me alone. So, I finally just put it all together, and voile!”

     The two men just continued to stare at Neal with puzzled expressions on their faces. Oh for God’s sake—did Neal have to do everything!

     “If you put the numbers all together,” he patiently explained, one syllable at a time, so as not to befuddle them, “you get the fourth month of April, the two is the day, and when you put 19 and 87 side by side, you get the year. So, April 2, 1987. Then, if you subtract 1987 from 2015, the number that you are left with is 28.”

     Enlightenment finally dawned on two round faces, and Neal heaved a mental sigh of relief. Patience is a virtue, he kept reminding himself. So, he sat back and waited for the show to begin.

     The first act opened with a bang—literally. Neal had taken apart the bullets from Benny’s gun while he slept. He had then carefully packed an ample amount of gunpowder into the tiny holes of the gas burners on the stovetop. When Benny tried to heat up a few cans of beans for dinner, the flame ignited the black power and, without warning, it suddenly sounded like the epic gunfight at the OK Corral.

     Neal placidly leaned back against the wall and watched the chaos as the two clowns kept banging into one another in their effort to douse the stove with water. It didn’t seem to matter to them that there were no flames! When they wore themselves out and looked back at him, he simply favored them with a grin that proclaimed “I warned you.”

     Eventually, when they got their quivering nerves back under control, they decided to use the fireplace to cook dinner. Giving their captive a wide berth, they carefully rolled up a discarded newspaper to act as kindling under an old, dry log sitting on the hearth.

     “Don’t forget to open the flue,” Neal helpfully advised. “Wouldn’t want it to get all smoky in here.”

     During his hasty foraging earlier, Neal had found a jar of boric acid under the kitchen sink. Sometime during the past, it probably had been purchased at the local drug store to be used as an insect barrier in the rustic house. The con man, with a trick up his sleeve, had made sure to pack the white powder densely inside the flue. As planned, it came cascading down when the lever was pulled. It didn’t set off any alarm bells for the kidnappers, who thought that it was simply an accumulation of ash and soot. However, when ignited, the roaring flames in the fireplace suddenly produced a horrifyingly lurid lime-green pyrotechnic display.

     Benny and Cecil stood rooted in place. Cecil was making little whimpering noises in the back of his throat, and the crotch of Benny’s pants suddenly darkened with a spreading stain. Neal just glared, crossed his arms across his chest, and looked exceedingly evil. Jack Nicholson could not have done it better.

     He watched curiously as the two men quickly went out onto the front porch and conferred. When they returned, it was apparent that they had concocted a Plan B. They timidly unchained him, and then bound him hand and foot with yards of duct tape. Cecil then hoisted Neal onto his shoulder and carried him out to the car, where he was once again unceremoniously plunked into the trunk. The con man was really getting tired of this musty, dusty means of transportation. His life simply demanded more decorum!

     After about an hour of driving, the car stopped. Cecil once again grabbed onto Neal and held him upright while Benny sawed at the duct tape that bound his ankles and hands. When Neal got his bearings, he realized that he stood on a road, still in the middle of nowhere, in the dead of night.

     “Look, man, we’re real sorry for causing you any trouble. No harm, no foul—right?” Benny groveled.

     “Yeah,” Cecil agreed, “we just want to forget about everything and go in peace. So, just start walking on this road and you’ll come to a gas station in about thirty miles. When you get there, you can maybe call your friends to pick you up. Tell them to forget about any ransom. We’re _sooo_ not interested in that anymore.” Benny was vigorously bobbing his head in agreement.

     Then both men hastily beat a retreat to the car, made an awkward U-turn maneuver, and re-traced their route in a cloud of dust. Neal was not walking anywhere, especially not in these handcrafted Gucci loafers. Instead, he sat down gingerly on the side of the road and waited. Within ten minutes, he saw the lights of an oncoming vehicle that hit the brakes when its headlamps detected Neal.

     Mozzie extricated himself from the Jeep, sighed deeply, and asked snarkily, “What am I getting you out of this time? Do you realize that I will have to burn a perfectly good email account, now that I have shown it to the Feds? Of course, I didn’t make it easy for them. I re-routed the account through various European and Asian cities ad infinitum. That will slow them down in tracing it back to New York’s Public Library. I did that on the off chance that you might want to make a run for it now that the anklet is not in play.”

     “Nah, Moz, not today, but maybe next time. What exactly did Peter say?”

     “Well, of course they were all looking for you, but they had no camera footage from that alley to view or leads on the street to follow. Up until the time that I showed up, they were still doing their imitation of rats in a maze. As to the ransom demand, Peter says that they don’t have enough money in the discretionary fund to cover it, but he’ll pass the hat in the bullpen.”

     “Aw, that was so sweet,” Neal crooned.

     “So, what do you want to do, Neal, until Big Brother unravels the clues and comes to rescue you? Do you want me to expedite things by telling Peter where you are? After I figured out that the email originated from the library, and narrowed down the exact terminal, I took myself there and eyeballed the guy before I answered him. He’s a really big one, isn’t he? Is he armed and dangerous?”

     “Actually, there are two ‘tons of fun’ involved in this. They are armed, Moz, but all the cartridges are now blanks. As for dangerous, that’s a relative term. If they try to procreate and reproduce themselves, then they are indeed a danger to the future of the human race as we know it. They are not the brightest bulbs in the box.”

     Mozzie snorted. “Well, I took the liberty of placing a tracking device on the kidnapper’s car when it was parked at the library. He’s now heading north.”

     “Yeah, there’s this ramshackle old cabin about an hour in that direction. I need you to take me back there, and then give Peter the coordinates in the morning. His closure stats have dipped a bit, and this would bolster his success rate. Plus, it will look really good if he catches the perpetrators in the act, so I need to be on site.”

     “Whatever,” Mozzie mumbled.

     They took their time returning to the cabin. Neal wanted to give his former roomies time to get settled in. When he cautiously climbed through the bathroom window, he heard a duet of snores coming from the bedroom. When he peeked in, there was a nightlight plugged into the wall, and both cots had been pushed together so that the two kidnappers were side by side with the gun between them. Neal would not have been surprised to see them wearing leis of garlic bulbs around their necks.

     When his ersatz captors ambled out in the morning, Neal was already re-manacled, although this time he had appropriated one of the sofa cushions to make the floor a little more bearable on his rump. Benny was the first to see him, and actually screamed like a little girl while trying to hide behind Cecil. That was a hard feat to pull off, but he gave it the old college try anyway. Cecil, on the other hand, just let his jaw hang open. Eventually, he started mumbling, “No, no, no—please no!”

     Visibly trembling, they tried to bargain with the specter before them.

     “Look, Mr. Consultant—Sir—we told you how very sorry we are for snatching you,” Cecil stuttered. “Our bad—all the way! What can we do to make it up to you so that you will go away? Would money help? My Mom has some savings bonds that maybe I can get her to cash in, and a life insurance policy, too.”

     “Yeah,” Benny chimed in, “and mine has a certificate of deposit that she’s saving for her funeral expenses. She wants this special baby blue casket that she has all picked out, and man, that is one expensive box to just stick in the ground. I can always have her cremated for a lot less.”

     “So, how about it,” Cecil asked? “Give us a few days and we can probably get you about 20K.”

     Neal just leaned back nonchalantly and mused how his net value had dropped from $600,000 to $20,000 in less than twenty-four hours. That did not do a whole lot for his ego, but C’est la vie.

     Negotiations were still going on later in the morning. Stereos, Wii consoles, and IPods were being offered as enticements when the door to the cabin was suddenly kicked open and a SWAT team streamed through. Neal hoped that Benny had better control of his bladder this time. He didn’t wish any more humiliation on the man—after all, he had just offered to give Neal his “One Direction” CD collection.

     Peter eventually waltzed in decked out in an impressive bulletproof vest. Actually, Neal thought he looked kinda hot, in a macho sort of way. He needed to ditch those coats and ties more often!

     “Are you okay, Neal?” he asked solicitously.

     “Just peachy,” Neal chirped.

     “What did you do to those two, Neal? They were blathering like idiots when we were putting them in the SWAT van, begging us to keep the devil away. They actually asked for protective custody!”

     Neal just turned his palms up and shrugged innocently. “Maybe they’re just trying to lay the groundwork for an insanity plea, Peter.”

     The FBI agent had a key in his hand that he had found in the pocket of one of the kidnappers. He looked down at Neal’s ankle and the innocuous little lock. He huffed out a sigh and wrinkled his brow.    

     “Seriously?”

     “Seriously!” Neal said with a wide grin.

**Author's Note:**

> 'Seriously,' I don’t know what part of my brain this story came from. Perhaps premature senility is setting in. That being said, if you liked the story, just check the little “kudo” box and refrain from making any comments that pertain to my sanity!


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